ArgentRaven

joined 2 years ago
[–] ArgentRaven 34 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I learned to fix it. Before YouTube, that usually means not so great. But now, I usually do at least as good as a job as the people I'd hire.

Fixing stuff is easy, and you have to accept that there's no perfect fix.

Ants, set out ant bait traps. Look outside and see if there's a trail, follow it to the source, and spray it with ant poison.

Cracks, YouTube that. They may be nothing.

Leaks, if it's plumbing, you can buy pipes at home Depot and replace them.

Granted, it will take a while. Maybe all day. But you'll get an endorphin rush when it's done and eventually you'll come to know all the ins and outs of your house.

But it's you look at it and it's too big, Google a company to do it. Even if you're halfway, and find you're stuck. No shame in getting help. This shines you don't have a family member or friend who's already handy.

But really, if you can't fix it, can't afford to have it fixed, just do what you can to keep the house clean and work on it a little bit or put aside money till you can. That's hard, but that's owning a house. Like anything in life, it's difficult. But it doesn't have to stay that way, with enough time and practice.

You're already smarter than many, asking for other's opinions. Don't suffer in silence. I believe in you!

[–] ArgentRaven 19 points 2 days ago (5 children)

As many times as I've seen it, it's still really worthwhile to see it again. Unfortunately it seems like we're progressing down the wrong path a little more, year after year, as long as I can remember.

[–] ArgentRaven 2 points 3 days ago

There's also kanuchi, a hickory nut soup. It's kind of an involved process, and hickory nuts aren't as easily available in stores as others, but it's a really unique soup.

[–] ArgentRaven 13 points 6 days ago

Until we find that Nestle is just bottling the same tap water at twice the price. Oops!

[–] ArgentRaven 28 points 1 week ago

I doubt it matters what we think anymore. It barely did before, but I can't see any light at the end of this American Experiment tunnel.

[–] ArgentRaven 5 points 1 week ago

I play FFXIV. I'll break it down by expansions, but it's the one that didn't follow the general downwards trend so much.

1.0 - trash. They couldn't figure out how to work together. One guy spends forever making the best looking water wheel ever, in the background, that you never interact with. It's too graphically intensive, and flows the wrong way from the water. It doesn't match the building it's attached to. Meanwhile, they forget to add roads towards main cities. It's an unplayable mess. It's literally unplayable, as they killed it off to replace it with:

2.0, A Realm Reborn - they really fixed it under one guy's leadership. It's playable, and works. It's outdated somewhat today, but has a lot of moral grey areas and twists. There's a lot of running around and time wasting, which was common back then.

Heavenward - they made a great story. It's one of the best expansions. Streamlined and faster. No needless "talk to 5 villagers" quests like previously.

Stormblood - not as great. There's a lot of setup they use later. The world building is really great, though. Some of the best looking areas.

Shadowbringers - the best expansion they've ever made. Perfectly balanced world building and characters, and story. This is peak FF, with the best music as well. Probably because they can ditch much of the old A Realm Reborn story.

Endwalker - ties it all together. The story leads up to "death is inevitable for everything that has ever lived, so just die now" kind of depression hopelessness that you wonder how they'll get out of it. Well, because it's Japanese and FF, it's the power of friendship that saves the day. But, this really feels like the culmination of everything they've learned in the previous expansions.

Dawntrail - this is the downward slide. They force you into a role to support someone for ruler that is almost slapstick bad. Characters don't make logical choices. The theme is all over the place and can't decide what it wants to be. Many people say to stop at endwalker, but we'll see how the next expansion goes, which is years away.

There's plenty to say about the game otherwise, but the general thought is that they're gradually cutting corners, taking longer, and under delivering as they're stretched too thin. They're feeling the same pressure everyone else in the world is - not enough money. Which is crazy, because FFXIV is THE game keeping Square Enix alive.

[–] ArgentRaven 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Their best album, imo. Which is saying something because they have a lot of great albums.

I got to see this live back in like 2009 I think. When they toured with Dethklok, High on Fire, and Converge. What a cool show! The visualizations were of these images on the cover shooting towards you in space. They played the whole album, which sadly didn't leave room for Blood and Thunder at the end. But! They did play that during the Mega Monsters tour with Gojira! Unfortunately their visualizations broke during the show, but they were playing such heavy stuff that we're all thinking that they really are going to make a heavier album next, like they said.

[–] ArgentRaven 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's not as iconic as From Mars to Sirius, or The Link, but it's a great cover. I have this poster hanging in my den!

[–] ArgentRaven 7 points 1 week ago

It also depends on what access they have. Easiest would be to axe subsidies to oil companies, but no way they're be able to just do something like that. There's too much protection around that money.

Of course, if they're doing exactly as DOGE, they suck and I'm glad they're blocked because DOGE has made terrible decisions.

[–] ArgentRaven 4 points 1 week ago
  1. The woman in the video released the footage, to help her case against him.

  2. we're seeing a leopard eat a face in real time, here

  3. same, he needs a short, sharp, shock. Right to the head. I would also settle for a swift kick in his ass.

[–] ArgentRaven 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I have found that silicone wiper blades last years longer than the old rubber ones, to the point I'd replace the rubber ones 3-4 times more often for one silicone blade.

Just food for thought. Since you'll be replacing them again eventually.

[–] ArgentRaven 22 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Whatever glue they're using has a different expansion/contraction rate than the stainless steel, and the fairly smooth metal doesn't give much surface area to hold, anyway. So in cold or hot days, you're going to see separation.

And it doesn't help when they don't even glue the right pattern from the factory.

 

If you just found out your kid is a leftie, most of the world we can adapt to. But something that will make their school years easier, as well as their crafting ability, is left handed scissors. Once I got my pair, I found it was individually easier to cut things out. Try it - the typical pair is molded for a right hand, so it cuts into your thumb over extended use. But the worst part is the way the blades connect - you can't see what you're cutting! You have to hold your left hand far over your body's right side, or crane your neck over your hand to see what you're cutting. Otherwise, you just guess and it looks sloppy.

Keyboards, pianos, drums, doors, manual cars, all of this can be overcome. But scissors? Lefties need leftie scissors. I'm still using my pair 30 years later and they're worth their weight in gold.

 

I inherited my grandfather's WWII compass, and had it sitting around for a long time on a shelf. I recently got a Geiger counter, and find that it's radioactive. Around 10 microsieverts/hr. Apparently they used radium paint to make them glow in the dark. I can't just throw it away, but I don't want it potentially causing a danger to others in the room. Is there some sort of lead lined box I can put it in, or some kind of prevention I can do? Is there anyone experienced with this sort of thing that can offer some advice?

 

If you've been crashing in FFXIV and are greeted by the error "Fatal Direct X Error: 11000002", then hopefully this will help.

Fatal Direct X Error: 11000002 is, unfortunately, a GENERIC error. There's nothing specific about it, other than DirectX had a problem with the client and crashed. Square-Enix doesn't allow any debugging, and doesn't seem to be interested in digging deeper into this error. They always tell you to give them a readout of your specs, and re-verify your game files. Then they fade away if that doesn't work, because they don't know what else to do, either. There's simply too many factors in a generic error to know.

I've been dealing with this for about a year. I work in the IT industry, and this is what I've found so far (I have edited this down, so not all efforts are shown).

I have an AMD CPU, a Ryzen 7 3700X, and the R5700XT GPU. However, I also had this error with an Nvidia 1070. This started right around the time Endwalker launched.

Things I've tried that didn't seem to make a difference:

  1. Switching GPUs

  2. Replacing and Upgrading memory

  3. Changing timing of memory in BIOS

  4. Updating BIOS

  5. Updating/Downgrading GPU drivers

  6. Uninstalling Adrenaline software

  7. Turning off ALL other programs on a fresh boot up

  8. Removing overlays (Discord, AMD Adrenaline junk, closing Steam even though it's not running through Steam)

  9. Using GPU Studio drivers (AMD)

  10. Using GPU MS graphics drivers

  11. Disabling SMT (AMD CPU Simultaneous Multithreading)

  12. Reinstalling DirectX

  13. Reinstalling/re-verifying FFXIV game files

Things I did that seemed to help:

  1. Disabling Real Time Reflections and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSBAO+ Quality) (these are in-game options) - turns out, SSBAO is very intensive and causes frequent crashing if you're prone to these errors already. This made the biggest difference and increased my time between crashes.

  2. Capping frame rate at 1:1 instead of Unlimited. If you don't have a 1:1 option, Unlimited is likely a better choice. That's what I found on my 1070.

  3. Making sure that both monitors used the same cable method (DisplayPort) and thus could have the same refresh rate. I originally used on DisplayPort and one HMDI - despite having two of the same monitors, this limited HDMI's frame rate and caused more crashes. You want all monitors on the same refresh rate, especially if you change focus from the game to something else.

  4. Turn off Full Screen Enhancements in the Properties of the FFXIV launcher shortcut.

  5. UNDERVOLTING the 5700XT via Adrenaline menu - if it didn't crash my system, I had less fatal directx errors this way

  6. Turning off xBox gaming overlay in Windows

  7. Turning off Game Mode in Windows - this supposedly "Helps achieve a more stable frame rate depending on the specific game and system" but in practice seemed to hamper FFXIV performance.

Things I did that made it worse:

  1. Running video on my second monitor/switching focus to that monitor

  2. Switching to Windowed Mode (Fullscreen or Borderless Windowed mode worked slightly better)

Clues I learned along the way:

  1. Inside most cities and other high-intensity areas that Square-Enix can predict, they seem to cap fps or effects for stability. So I rarely crashed in Limsa or the Golden Saucer. However, I most commonly crashed in dungeons, raids, and trials. Phase 2 of the Ultima Weapon in the MSQ Roulette was very common.

  2. After running sfc/scannow and rebooting, the next two crashes gave me a blue screen and actual memory .DMP files. They said the graphics card had "invalid fence IDs". This means that the GPU returned results either too fast, or too slow, from what the CPU was expecting and allotted. The BSODs happened much faster, about 10-20 minutes into play. Not like a slow buildup of hours like before. This time, it seemed to indicate that something was checking for data slower than the GPU could push out results. Meaning, the GPU was processing too fast for its own good. So I undervolted the GPU. I have seemed to stay more stable, but this didn't fix the problem completely.

  3. I also had a problem with sound cutout in Frontlines when playing Seal Rock - and it wouldn't restart even if I restarted my audio services. Turns out, FFXIV uses a lower-level access method to access the sound drivers directly instead of going through Windows services. This is controlled by "exclusive access" which you can actually see in your sound options in Windows. You want FFXIV to have exclusive access. And "Give Priority". I had to disable my monitors as audio devices in Device Manager (DisplayPort can send audio, like HDMI). Even though they had no speakers, FFXIV was momentarily confused on which device to use. It wouldn't repair itself until I closed and reopened the game. I disabled my GPU from being an audio source. This left me with my motherboard's Realtech driver as the sole source of audio, so there was no more confusion. I also turned off my Gamepad options in the FFXIV menu, which apparently also does something with audio. Why do I bring this up? Because I suspect the video runs the same way - bypassing Windows control. So when you use all these new Windows features, they just interfere with communication between the game and your hardware. Turning off as much of it as possible is ideal. If you troubleshoot with that in mind, you'll likely have better success.

My solution: I tested again by switching graphics cards. I put my old 1070 card back in, and haven't crashed since, even when I turn on Real Time Reflections and SSAO again. The frame rate suffers, but I can tell that it renders better. Real Time Reflections specifically looks better than with the AMD setup. While I believe that this is not a problem exclusive to AMD GPUs or even the 5700xt, it does seem like it exacerbates the problem. The RX5700xt just has poor drivers and poor hardware (the GPU screws can't get tight enough to hold the heatsink on fully). I think my other configuration issues like the two different cables causing two different refresh rates caused my crashes on the 1070 initially. In the end, I bought another graphics card (4070) and haven't had an issue. I suspect other AMD cards would probably be ok as well, if their drivers were written properly. There's a lot of problems with the RX5700xt physically (short screws can't keep the heat sink on the chip well) and driver-wise.

I hope this helps somone else out there!

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